I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Isaiah 48-51.

    God has given us the prophetic words in Scripture so that we would know when they came to pass that He is God. This prophetic word is more than just predictions about the future. He has done this because He knows how stubborn we are, how determined we are to deny that He is God. I remember reading “The Road Less Travelled” by M. Scott Peck. In the book he discusses how he was working on his research into the role forgiveness plays in mental health. At the time, the idea that we needed to forgive those who wronged us was a new concept in psychology. Modern psychology was just discovering how devastating refusing to forgive was to mental health. Dr. Peck wrote how he was surprised to learn that the New Testament spoke of this very things, 2,000 years earlier than modern science had discovered this truth. It was this revelation which led him to come to know the Lord. There is a cycle which mankind goes through time after time: we reject God’s teachings, we suffer the consequences, we discover that the teaching we had rejected was right, we claim to have known that all along, we use a misrepresentation of this truth as an excuse to reject another of God’s teachings…and the cycle repeats.

    At the beginning of Chapter 49 there is a passage which is, correctly, often seen as a prophecy about Jesus’ ministry, but, like so many of the prophetic writings in Scripture, there is more to it than that. It is a prophecy directed at each and every one of us. God called you before you were born. Not you in a general sort of way in which He might have called anyone who would answer. No, He called you specifically, by name. He said, “You are my servant and you will bring me glory.” Further, the prophet reminds us that we are not alone in thinking that our work for the Lord is worthless. The prophet felt the same way. Yet God declared that the prophet would bring His salvation to the ends of the earth. In between those two parts is the thing which we must do: we must leave it in God’s hands.